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ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the school climate host, Frank Chipparo, Director of Social Projects at the block. And I'm very excited to have joining us on the other side of the mic, Monib Ali, CEO of Trust Machines and co-founder of Stax. I don't know why. I feel like you've been on the show before because we've had so many interesting conversations over the past half decade from regulation to tech. But I'm pretty sure this is the first time we've had you on. Obviously, we have to have you on with Stax up over 50% over the last month and everything happening with Bitcoin. Thanks for joining the program.

For sure, no, great to be here.

So let's sort of just maybe for folks who are unfamiliar with the ecosystem and your story. Let's just give them the TLDR on Stax and Trust Machines as a company helping support the growth of that ecosystem. Sure.

So I think people should think of Stax as a Bitcoin L2 and it started in late 2017. I think 2017 was a bull market year. Bitcoin fees actually went up a lot and it made very clear to some of the devs. So I was building on Bitcoin L1 back then. So my career started in Bitcoin like I'm in 2013 when I was finishing my PhD. And I have the battle scars to show. If you tried building on the Bitcoin L1 and then the fees go up on you like they did in 2017 and you realize that this thing is never going to scale. It's crystal clear to you. So I think that's when lightning started. That's when Stax started late 2017. And we sort of like re-is capital and did some R&D because in the Bitcoin culture, I think there was a lot of focus on safety as well. Right. So one of the big things in Stax is you want to come up with safer programming languages. So that resulted in clarity and the main event live in 2021, early 2021. I think honestly, I would say we were a couple of years too early. Like even in 2021, yes, we got some traction. We maybe got devs. But the broader industry, like I don't think they were as tuned in on why a Bitcoin L2 or why these things are important as they are now. Now really seems like the time where Bitcoin L2 is emerging as a category. And in some ways, it worked out for us. Like sure, I think we were a couple of years too early. It gave us like real world data. For example, the launch in 2021, we realized that running at Bitcoin speed is not going to work for normal users, right? Like 10 to 40 minutes for a block and our L2 blocks were timed with Bitcoin blocks. So we realized that the L2 blocks would have to be significantly faster and also figuring out how to get a lot of BTC liquidity from L1 to L2 turned out to be a very, very important thing and being able to do that in a safe way. So those two things have been a focus area where that last year or two where, and this ecosystem also decentralized abroad. So I'm giving a, like, I'm trying to pack like several years into a couple of lines, but Stax was also the first project that did a SEC qualified offering, which meant that anyone, even regular people in the US could actually participate in the initial offering. But then that also meant that we had to decentralize very, very explicitly, right? So Stax, sort of like the initial entity was dismantled in several ways. It still exists in another shape or form, but there's several other independent players in the ecosystem. And that's where I think Trust Machine comes in. So I, with my co-founder, raised fresh capital into an entity where we're like, hey, there's an opportunity for building something like a consensus for Bitcoin where yes, Bitcoin doesn't have a lot of functionality on the L1, but with L2s like Stax, we can actually build interesting protocols or web wallets or security protocols and so on. And then we were working on at Trust Machines. And I think let me pause there because then there's interesting stuff that happened last year with our nodes that sort of like kickstarted all of this.